


|| Turn Me To Gold In The Sunlight ||

by deliciouslycrzy



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen, M/M, angst and tragedy are the usually the order of the day with me so this is no different
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 19:01:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/929975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliciouslycrzy/pseuds/deliciouslycrzy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she is older with blue in her hair and fire in her heart she'll realize that promises can be broken and some lies are told not out of spite nor malice but out of love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	|| Turn Me To Gold In The Sunlight ||

**Author's Note:**

  * For [asynchrony](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asynchrony/gifts).



> This was written as a jaegercon gift exchange fill from myself to klutzygeek, and oh wow I hope she likes it- it certainly turned out a lot different than I had planned it, with more Kaidanovskys and more Herc Hansen than in the initial plan. These things always develop their own mind, at least when I start to write ^_^ 
> 
> So the usual disclaimer, Pacific RIm isn't mine, and all credit goes to the creators, all I came up with is the idea and angst.

He adopts her, but it is years before she finds it in herself to call him father.

When she thinks of the word father she thinks of the man who raised her, fading further and further into the obscurity of a child’s faded memories as she herself grows farther and farther from the young girl who laughed easily at his stupid jokes and caught cherry blossoms as they fell from the trees because he told her her wishes would come true with every caught blossom.

It was a silly superstition, and yet-

Mako yearns sometimes for those silly, languid afternoons where her only worry was about how many cherry blossoms she could catch.

_When she's older with blue in her hair and fire in her heart she'll realize that promises can be broken and some lies are told not out of spite nor malice but love._

In the future she will worry about other things, adult things, but for now...

Now she worries about the cold in Anchorage and whether or not Mr. Pentecost is going to have to go back into a Jaeger(something that she still thinks is very exciting as much as she doesn't want him to leave her)and where they'll be traveling next and when she'll finally be able to start at the Jaeger Academy because Mr. Pentecost promised, and he always kept his promises.

Out of respect, he is Uncle, for calling him Mr. Pentecost makes his face scrunch into something that she will later recognize as a pained expression, but for now the young girl simply knows she does not like this face and thus avoids calling him that, and ‘Stacker’ was far too familiar, reserved for the man with the red hair and funny accent from Sydney who visits and talks to Uncle in quiet whispers into the long hours of the night, when they think that she is asleep and will not catch their secret glances or brushed caresses.

Mako only cares about the fact that they're both sitting in between her and the kitchen where the tea pot is- she couldn’t care less about the weird sucking noises or the fact that she can’t see Uncle Pentecost’s hand where it is under the other man’s shirt.

She sneaks by them that time, doing her best impression of a spy in those movies that come on late at night that Pentecost doesn’t know she watches- he’s always distracted by something it seems, but she understands, because he’s part of the PPDC and he’s a Jaeger pilot and he’s brave and smart and he takes her all over with him, and she trusts him even though she’s only known him a few months because of the way he smiles at her, quiet and reserved but  _honest._

So he is Uncle, and the man who visits them wherever they end up- sometimes with his sullen, bad-tempered son in tow and sometimes not- is named Sergeant Hansen, and part of Mako thinks he is the most handsome man she's ever seen, at least until she meets the next pilot to stop by.

_At fourteen she thinks any man who pilots a Jaeger is worth her affections, because of course it means they must be as brave and honorable and nice as Stacker Pentecost and Hercules Hansen. At 21- after meeting the man who the youngest Hansen has become, she knows differently._

They argue when she wants to join the PPDC, again and again and she feels like she’s cracking apart whenever he says no and she has to once again replace her beaten and battered application back in its place in her bedroom, tucked into the books and the folders from those online classes she’s in, the classes that teach her math that she already knows and dates and history and about the different governments around the world, and its all just so  _boring_  because she wants to be learning about the Kaiju and Jaegers and to be able to fight and kill them just like Uncle does, just like Sergeant Hansen and the rest of the Jaeger pilots.

He tells her he wants her to be safe, but she doesn’t want safety.

She wants revenge.

Vengeance- she wants to kill them all, to strike the same fear in them that she had struck into her when she was small and weak and unable to fight back, when all she could do was run and scream and hide. She wants to make them run and scream and hide, but-

These are not the thoughts she should be having, so she doesn’t say anything, because she should be the sweet, obedient little girl that she usually is, all smiles and gentle courtesy, she should not have revenge burning away at her insides.

Every time that he says no, she doesn’t say anything.

She doesn’t say anything and she still doesn’t say anything, until the day that she goes into her room and she can’t find her application, careworn and over a year old but still in good enough condition because she knew one day she’d be able to submit it, and Mako walks out into the living room in a loss and there is Uncle, sitting there with the old form in his hand and an Acceptance letter in his other, with a queerly sad smile on his lips as he holds the letter out for her.

And even though it says technician program and not ranger, still she smiles until it hurts and her eyes feel hot and prickling and she saves her tears for later, because she’s finally going in the right direction, because soon she’ll be able to work on the very things that will kill Kaiju, she will get to build and create and finally be able to work towards  _something_  that matters.

Mako Mori is fifteen years old when she steps into her Jaeger Academy Class, and when she calls him and tells him all about it, she slips and calls him father for the first time.

_She is called the brightest, the best, and yet no matter how many simulators she runs, no matter the fact that she has gone undefeated in her sim score and has set the new Academy record, her name is still on the grounded list and still that fire festers in her heart._

She is standing in a drugstore in Vladivostok, comparing the shades of blue hair dye while Sasha Kaidanovsky appears to be depositing the store’s entire stock of platinum blonde hair dye into her shopping basket. Which isn’t much, considering that they’re in a port city and things like hair dye take a backseat to medicines and food, but still.

Mako’s not sure why she needs ten boxes of the dye, but after a year spent in the Vladivostok Shatterdome working alongside the Kaidanovskys, she’s learned to stop asking questions - not about the hair dye and the fact that its only for Mr. Kaidanovsky, not about the pills she’s seen in their quarters on Sasha’s bedside table or how sometimes she sees blood on the older woman’s teeth or when  _Cherno Alpha_  is prepared for deployment and they’re waiting on the Kaidanovskys and only Aleksis comes, and with a shake of his head all the technicians and LOCCENT know that means they have to call up one of the other teams instead.

She knows enough to know not to ask, and instead looks back to the section of blues.

‘Gipsy Danger Blue’, ‘Pacific Blue’, ‘Blue Drift’, and- her gaze froze, fingertips pausing over the plastic packaging of the coloring, a deep, shocking shade, between cobalt and teal and she’s seen it before, that shade of blue melting through steel like hot water melting ice, and she smiles, soft but with a glint in her eyes as she remembers a conversation she’s had with Sasha before, about wearing lipstick like warpaint and just because they were soldiers didn’t mean they couldn’t look good while they were doing it.

_‘Wear your womanhood like warpaint and they cannot use it against you.’_

Later when they’re back at the Shatterdome and the dye is still drying in her hair, Mako watches herself in the mirror of the Kaidanovskys quarters, straightening her shoulders and raising her chin as she’s seen Sasha do, but instead of looking fierce she looks like a child playing at dress up, and her shoulders slump and she leans forward, palms leveraging against the hard surface of the sink and her head hangs low, limp, brilliant blue bangs hanging in her eyes.

For a moment, part of her thinks that this was a terrible idea.

  
She will never be like Sasha, a pilot or a Ranger or the woman who could strike fear into a man’s heart with only a glare, because she is still young and small and Uncle will never let her near a conn-pod, he’s made that clear, but-

Mako looks up, brown eyes meeting her reflection through the mirror. They were harder than she’d thought, and where her mouth had once been a trembling line - years and years ago when she’d ran and ran and couldn’t stop- it’s a firm steady curve.

_No one can stop you._

Her lips were pink and pale and a tube of lipstick was clutched in her fingertips and for another moment she falters- she can hear the muted rumble of Russian from the other room, punctuated with the the sound of small, short bursts of laughter as, supposedly, Sasha finishes dyeing her husbands hair.

_Wear it like warpaint._

And so later, when she’s back in her own room and is pinging Father all the way in Hong Kong, her painted blue lips curve into a confident smile and she stands straight, hands clasped behind her back and chin held high as Pentecost comes into view, sitting at what seems to be a makeshift desk with a cup of coffee on his right and blood on his collar.

She knows what that means but says nothing about it- she knows better.

“ I’m going to be a Ranger.” She says instead, and this time, her voice doesn’t falter.

It is  not a question.

_Fifty one drops and fifty one kills and its a travesty, they whisper, that Mako Mori is on the ‘grounded’ list with no end in sight._

Her heart is heavy with grief, with that familiar ache for vengeance that she had begun to think might just fade with time and she is anger in a drive suit. She wants to lash out at him, because it’s father’s fault, because he’s the only one she can blame for this loss, for the two jaegers sunk in Victoria Harbor and the five pilots lost, because the Kaiju who did it are dead and there is no one else at the moment.

Perhaps it is because she knows them, that it aches so much more than it had ached before when they’d lost pilots, or perhaps its the fact that now she  _knows_  what it feels like, to be wrenched away from the person who knows you better than you do, to feel their pain and fear and confusion as they die and she can’t stop imagining what happened in those conn pods.

The Wei Tang triplets and their vitals had all seemed to be lost at the same time, and it is a small, near insignificant thing but Mako knows that if it were her and Raleigh, she would hope for the same because if she were to die she’d rather they die at once so he didn’t have to feel that gut-wrenching loss a second time.

And so she wouldn’t have to either.

Aleksis’s Kaidanovsky’s vital signs had been lost first, and though Tendo Choi has said before that just means they were disconnected, they could still be alive -  _she sees the hope in his eyes and it hurts_ \- no one really believes it, and Mako cannot stop thinking about the hateful, ferocious scream that had rent from the comm system, a hoarse and awful thing rent from lungs not yet filled with water as her other half was ripped away.

Mako doesn’t let herself think about it until after Leatherback and Otachi are dead, because she thinks that perhaps it will hurt less once the Kaiju are dead and that perhaps the rage will subside, but-

It doesn’t.

It doesn’t and it doesn’t because though the Kaiju are dead it was Father’s decision to send only Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon, two jaegers against two Category IVs and of course it wouldn’t have worked and she wonders what would have been different if all four of them had deployed, and then it brings it back around to-

It’s her fault. If she’d just been able to-

But that isn’t true either.

It is no ones fault but those beyond the Breach, and perhaps that is what burns the most.

When he walks out in a drive suit it is as though her heart, already heavy, cracks in two, and she already knows that she’ll be losing someone else that she loves, and that just isn’t _fair._

_Raleigh slips into her bed at night and she lets him, lets his strong arms twine around her waist and his scruffy chin rest on her shoulder and lets her fall asleep to the sound of his breathing, and the sensation of his heartbeat against her back._

They have won.

The Breach has been closed and they have won but when Mako is looking over the casualty list it doesn’t feel like a victory.

Monuments are planned for each lost jaeger, all around the world, and Mako buries herself in that, in the restoration of  _Cherno Alpha_  and  _Crimson Typhoon_ , the recreation of _Striker Eureka_  and  _Gipsy Danger_ , because as long as she is busy, as long as she has grease stains up to her elbows and her thoughts full of statistics and dates, for as long as she can avoid any and all thought about those that had piloted the very things she is working to rebuild, she can avoid tears, because if she’s busy she doesn’t have to think about the fact that there will be no more tea shared as the sun rises, no more sparring practices until both she and he can barely speak and they’re both grinning, how the new Marshall Hansen looks at her with an empathy in his eyes as though he desperately wants to talk about something, how her voice stutters over _his_  name if she ever has to mention it.

But then the plans for the memorial to  _Coyote Tango_  crosses her desk, and suddenly she can’t anymore, because- he is dead and she and Hercules Hansen and Raleigh Becket are all that is left, they are the heroes the world celebrates, because they are the heroes that _lived._

Part of her thinks that is the hardest part of all of this.

That they must go on without those that made it possible for them to do so in the first place.

That they will be remembered and the man who took her in and raised her as his own would be relegated to a worn name on a plaque, forgotten as the years passed, that snow will cover what’s left of Cherno Alpha and the world won’t remember who held the Siberian Wall for six years, and salt will eat away at the inscriptions of the Wei Tang brothers until all thats left of them is their rebuilt Jaeger and whispers in the Bone Slums. 

But-

She still remembers her father, her real father, even though years and years of memories and growing up separated her from the little girl she had been then, so perhaps-

Perhaps.

And so when she leaves her office her eyes are red-rimmed but her eyes are clear, and  in her hands she clutches her latest plan, not a memorial to the Jaegers but to the pilots.

_A statue of the smiling Becket brother she never knew to grace Anchorage, the Kaidanovskys hand in hand in Vladivostok, standing guard over the city they’d risked their lives to save, the Wei Tang Brothers in Hong Kong, smiles on their faces and basketballs balanced on their fingertips, and in Tokyo-_

_In Tokyo, a man stands tall with his copilot at his side,  and it’s the smile she remembers from the first time she saw him, not as her savior but as her Uncle._

_As her Father._


End file.
